Alaska Borough Map with All 30 Boroughs and Population

How to use this map

Pick a map type along the top and the map redraws. Boroughs and census areas colours all 30 so no two neighbours share a fill, Density shades them by people per square kilometre, Satellite swaps the flat colours for real imagery of the state, and Blank outline gives you black on white for printing. Click any borough, or any row in the table, and its figures appear in the Selection panel: population, land area, density and borough seat.

Switch between metric and imperial with the Units control. Everything on the page follows it, including the downloads.

Where the data comes from

Boundaries and land areas come from the United States Census Bureau through the TIGERweb service, which is the same geography the Bureau uses for its own published tables. Populations are 2020 Census counts, and borough seats come from the published borough list.

The check that matters is the total. The 30 populations sum to 733,391, which is the published state figure, and the land areas sum to 1,479,895 square kilometres. If a set of figures for Alaska does not reach those totals, it is mixing census years or dropping units, and both are easy to do without noticing.

Alaska does not use counties. It has organised boroughs with their own government, census areas which have none and exist only so the Census Bureau has something to report against, and city and borough units that merge the two levels. All are county equivalents, which is why they appear together here.

Satellite imagery, and how it is fitted to the map

The Satellite map type replaces the flat borough colours with real imagery from NASA, specifically the Blue Marble shaded relief and bathymetry layer served through Global Imagery Browse Services. It is a cloud free composite rather than a single day of observations, so the whole state is visible at once instead of whatever cloud happened to be passing.

The imagery arrives as a plain latitude and longitude grid while this map is drawn in Lambert conformal conic. Laying one straight over the other would leave the coastline and the borough boundaries drifting apart as you move north. So every pixel is converted back to a latitude and longitude and the matching pixel is read from the source image, which puts both in the same projection. It is then clipped to the outline, so the map shows Alaska rather than a rectangle of the surrounding region.

The imagery is public domain. NASA asks to be credited rather than paid, and the credit is drawn onto the map itself so it travels with the image when you download it. That is also why this is NASA imagery rather than the sharper commercial layers on the big mapping sites. Those are licensed from private operators and cannot be redistributed through a download button.

Two practical notes. The imagery takes a second or two to appear the first time, because it is fetched and reprojected on the spot. And at roughly five hundred metres per pixel it is a landscape view rather than a street view, so you can read terrain, forest cover and coastline, but not individual buildings.

A check you can repeat on paper

Take Anchorage, the most populous borough in the state.

The Census Bureau gives it 291,247 people and 4,421 square kilometres of land. Divide one by the other and you get 65.9 people per square kilometre.

Select Anchorage and the Selection panel reads 65.9. Switch to imperial and it becomes 170.6 per square mile.

Now add the 30 land areas in the table. They come to 1,479,895 square kilometres, and the populations to 733,391.

What the numbers show

2 of the 30 hold half of Alaska between them: Anchorage, Matanuska-Susitna. They cover 4.6 percent of the land, leaving the other 28 to hold the remaining half.

The densest is Anchorage at 65.9 people per square kilometre, then Fairbanks North Star at 5.0. At the other end, Yukon-Koyukuk runs at 0.014 and Lake and Peninsula at 0.024. That is a spread of roughly 4,655 to one across a single state.

Yukon-Koyukuk is the largest by area at 377,536 square kilometres and holds 5,343 people, while Skagway is the smallest at 1,147. Alaska as a whole sits at 0.5 people per square kilometre, against a national figure of 36.2.

Mistakes that catch people out

Mixing census years. Populations from different vintages look identical on the page and only reveal themselves when the total misses 733,391. Every figure here is 2020.

Treating the drawn area as land. Every borough outline includes its inland water. Aleutians West is the clearest case here, enclosing about 218 percent more area than its land figure. Every density on this page is computed on land area, not on the area you see drawn, and the Selection panel shows both.

Assuming every unit here is a local government. The census areas are statistical only, covering the parts of Alaska with no borough government at all, which is most of the state by area.

Reading the colours as data. On the boroughs and census areas view the fills only ensure that neighbours differ, so a colour carries no meaning at all. The Density view is the one where colour maps to a number.

Related Calculators and Reference

• United States Map: all fifty states and the District of Columbia with satellite imagery, cities and rivers.
• US State Maps: every state with its capital, population, land area, density and borough count.
• Texas County Map: the largest set of counties in the country at 254.
• United States Census Bureau, Geography: the source of the boundaries and land areas used here.
• NASA Worldview: the imagery browser behind the satellite layer.

Borough boundaries and land area: United States Census Bureau, TIGERweb, public domain. Population: 2020 Census of Population and Housing. Satellite imagery: NASA EOSDIS Global Imagery Browse Services, Blue Marble shaded relief and bathymetry.